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agreement al- Khalidi had in mind is less certain.^84 Given al- Khalidi’s
many years in France, one possibility is that the broad rabbinic con-
sensus to which al- Khalidi refers here is Napoleon’s 1806 Assembly
of Notables, which declared that “in the eyes of Jews, Frenchmen are
their brethren,”^85 and the subsequent 1807 Paris Sanhedrin, which
claimed that “the learned of the age shall possess the inalienable right
to legislate according to the needs of the situation” and thus demanded
of Jews “obedience to the State in all matters civil and political.”^86
Beginning in 1898, al- Khalidi served as Ottoman consul general in Bor-
deaux, where he surely met Jews from the region’s highly acculturated
Se phar dic community that, a century earlier, had eagerly embraced
Napoleon’s conditions for French citizenship.^87 It is possible that al-
Khalidi’s Jewish acquaintances in the French port city told him of
this watershed event, which Herzl’s newly founded Zionist movement
seemed to undermine.
Alternatively, al- Khalidi may have been thinking of the resolutions
of the various Reform rabbinical conferences of the mid- to late nine-
teenth century that Gottheil mentioned in his encyclopedia article on
“Zionism.”^88 Gottheil had pointed to the 1845 “conference of Rabbis”
in Frankfurt- am- Main, the Philadelphia conference of 1869, and the
1885 Pittsburgh conference. The rabbis of the Frankfurt conference,
Gottheil writes, “decided to eliminate from the ritual ‘the prayers for
the return to the land of our forefathers and for the restoration of
the Jewish state.’ ” The language Gottheil cites from the Pittsburgh
conference’s resolutions even more closely matches al- Khalidi’s ver-
sion of Mendelssohn’s theory: “We consider ourselves no longer a
nation, but a religious community,” proclaimed these Reform rabbis,
“and we therefore expect neither a return to Palestine . . . nor any of
the laws concerning a Jewish state.”^89 To al- Khalidi, these rabbinical
(^84) I refer to this as a “corruption” not only because of the loss of the initial h but also
because of the use of a q in place of a k.
(^85) See Mendes- Flohr and Reinharz, TheJewintheModernWorld, 128– 32.
(^86) See ibid., 135– 36.
(^87) See Hyman, TheJewsofModernFrance, 2– 15, 41ff.
(^88) The first of these conferences, the 1844 Brunswick conference, considered ratifying
the Parisian Sanhedrin rulings. See Meyer, ResponsetoModernity, 134– 35.
(^89) Interestingly, the Pittsburgh conference was convened by the German- born Amer-
ican Reform rabbi Kaufmann Kohler. Kohler, who strongly opposed Zionism, was coau-
thor of the JewishEncyclopedia’s entry on “Islam” that, as noted above, referenced al-
Khalidi’s article on Muslim demographics. I am not aware of any evidence that suggests
that Kohler and al- Khalidi knew one another personally, but each was certainly familiar
with the other’s work. For a comparison of the definition of Jewishness articulated in the
“Pittsburgh Platform,” on the one hand, and in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s
charter of the 1960s, on the other, see Gribetz, “ ‘Their Blood Is eastern,’ ” 143.